Quote collection
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"It is as if Emily Brontë could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality."
"Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am."
"As I grow old I hate the writing of letters more and more, and like getting them better and better."
"Soup is cuisines kindest course"
"The roar of the traffic, the passage of undifferentiated faces, this way and that way, drugs me into dreams; rubs the features from faces. People might walk through me. And what is this moment of time, this particular day in which I have found myself caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar - forest trees or the roar of wild beasts. Time has whizzed back an inch or two on its reel; our short progress has been cancelled. I think also that our bodies are in truth naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence."
"To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone."
"Thoughts without words… Can that be?"
"A perfect treat must include a trip to a second-hand bookshop."
"I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me."
"The way to write well is to live intensely."
"The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman."
"Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself."
"As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking."
"Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded."
"To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away."
"What is a woman? I assure you, I do not know ... I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill."
"Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure"
"a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination."
"All great writers have, of course, an atmosphere in which they seem most at their ease and at their best; a mood of the general mind which they interpret and indeed almost discover, so that we come to read them rather for that than for any story or character or scene of seperate excellence."
"Her life-that was the only chance she had-the short season between two silences."